Since I was young, I was always told to work hard at school because achieving good grades leads to financial success. Besides financial prosperity, I was always told that academic education will make me exceptionally intelligent.

However, when I grew up and started studying successful and highly intelligent individuals, I realized that academic education did not play any role in making people intelligent or successful.

Also, I discovered the disastrous effects that academic education has had on people.

Therefore, in today’s article, I will provide the 5 main implications of academic education that make me doubt if it’s necessary for our progress in life.

Academic Education Prepares us to be Workers and Not Entrepreneurs

Academic education prepares us to work for other people for the rest of our lives. Teachers always told us that getting a high-paying job is the only path to prosperity. Therefore, we often struggled to get high grades so that we become employees and not employers.

Academic Education Makes Us to Have a Wrong Interpretation of Intelligence

Schools results in people having a wrong definition of intelligence. It makes people who fail in school think that they are unintelligent while it makes those who succeed in academic tests think they are intelligent individuals.

However, school does not make you intelligent. It only makes you an intellectual. An intellectual is an individual who can read, memorize, and understand things, while an intelligent person is he who has the ability to reason, and find solutions to all types of problems. Success in life requires intelligence and not intellectuality.

With this in mind, I believe that we all have the ability to prosper because we are all intelligent. However, school made some people believe that they are fools and they cannot prosper in life just because they failed to get good grades.

Academic Education Teaches us to Never Think Outside of the Box

Life requires us to always think creatively: to think outside the box. However, academic education made us to always think according to specific rules. We had to think the way the teachers and the books wanted us to think, and we were awarded low grades for thinking outside the box.

Academic Education Kills Talents

All Children are Born Artists: The Problem is to Remain Artists Till They Grow Up- Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)

Academic education has destroyed billions of talents. School made us believe that our talents won’t make us successful, because the only way we could achieve success is by succeeding in our exams and getting a job.

This idea has killed great footballers, painters, and writers, because it made children to avoid building their talents, and concentrate on memorizing useless words like ‘Panthera Leo, and ‘Aegyptopithecus.’ I wonder why we spent so much time learning these things yet we never apply them in real life. Can someone please tell me how knowing the ‘Panthera Leo’ has helped him gain happiness, inner peace, or achieve success?

I wonder how I came to believe that knowing about the, ‘aegyptopithecus’ is more important than my talent or God-given abilities.

Academic Education Makes us to Fear Making Mistakes

School made us fear making mistakes because we were awarded low grades or whipped for providing wrong answers.

However, entrepreneurs like Robert Kiyosaki teach that for us to be successful entrepreneurs, we must embrace making mistakes because we learn from them.

Moreover, life is a matter of experimenting. For us to be successful we have to try-out various methods/ways so that we pinpoint those that work for us. Therefore, making mistakes is unavoidable if we want to advance in life. However, according to school, making mistakes is bad, and punishable at times.

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The Happiness Lie, and How the Pursuit of Happiness Benefits the Elite

Happiness occurs when we have pleasant emotions because our life is happening the way we want.

Most of us think we are entitled to be happy all the time. However, achieving a constant state of happiness is impossible because usually, life doesn’t happen exactly the way we want. Things we don’t like often pop into our lives every now and then. For this reason, I think the only place you can achieve a constant state of happiness is ‘heaven.’

We have been conditioned to believe that we came into this world to be happy and that our main purpose in life is to pursue happiness. This is A LIE folks. Look around you, study history, and you’ll realize that THE CREATOR never brought us here to be constantly happy. Instead, The Creator brought us here to surmount all obstacles, and grow into our full potential.

The idea that we came here to be happy has been sold to us by the elite so that we constantly chase happiness. The elite hugely benefit when we chase happiness because this pursuit results in consumerism.

Today, we excessively buy material things because we believe they can make us happy, and as a result, the elite make huge profits because they own a large percentage of the companies in the world.

Besides making us spenders, the pursuit of happiness also benefits the elite because it prevents us from discovering our true nature. The elite know that they won’t manage to control us if we discover who we truly are. Therefore, they make us so obsessed with chasing happiness that we never care about knowing ourselves.

They make us focus on useless ideas, such as ‘my life is better because I am happier than you.’ For this reason, we take stupid selfies and post them on social media to prove that we are living happy lives. We have been made to believe that being constantly happy is the main goal of life. This belief has led to drug addiction and depression when we face hardships because we think life is unfair to us since we are not constantly happy.

Little do we know that no one is constantly happy because we were conditioned to be dissatisfied with what we have. For example, we are always happy when we get a job, but after a certain period, we get bored with the repetitive routine that we can’t wait to be out of our offices. Also, we are always happy when we buy something. However, after a certain period, we become used to it and start looking for other things to buy.

With this in mind, it is impossible for us to achieve a constant state of happiness because it’s our nature to be constantly dissatisfied so that we pursue growth. As Mark Manson puts it in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck,‘We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.’

That being said, understand that it’s okay to be unhappy and never ever pursue a constant state of happiness because it’s impossible to achieve it. Instead, pursue a meaningful life which comes only when you are brave enough to be authentic.

‘You feel separate from happiness and believe that you need to achieve something first to become happy. Then you start pursuing happiness and going after things the world told you will make you happy. But they never do. At the end of your life, you will realize that the pursuit of happiness was a lie.’ – Positivelypositive

Do you agree? Feel free to disagree by airing your view in the comment box below.

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Top 3 Misconceptions about Optimism That Make Us Give Up on Optimism and/or Believe It Doesn’t Work

Today, we strive to achieve an optimistic state of mind because many influential individuals and spiritual leaders advise us to be optimistic. Besides this, we practice optimism because we are aware of its advantages. However, most of us give up on optimism and believe it doesn’t work because of the following wrong beliefs we have about it.

We Believe:

Optimism automatically makes an individual successful

The self-help industry has made people believe they can attract success by simply meditating on a bright future. For this reason, many individuals practice optimism without putting in the effort, and they give up on optimism and conclude that it doesn’t work when they don’t attract success after a certain period. Little do they know that optimism takes long to attract success, and it only attracts success if accompanied by many years of hard work.

I believe the main purpose for optimism on the road to success, is to enable an individual to keep working despite the number of obstacles he/she faces.

Bad things don’t happen to optimistic people

People believe that only good things will happen to them if they practice optimism, and for this reason, they give up on optimism and believe it doesn’t work, when bad things happen to them while practicing optimism. I think motivational speakers must constantly remind people that optimism doesn’t prevent bad things from happening.

The main purpose of optimism is to enable you to persevere through hardships. Optimism enables you to attain inner peace during difficult times because it makes you believe that things will work out for you.

It is easy for a pessimistic person to succumb to depression when things don’t work out because this individual will believe that things will never change. Therefore, the main advantage of optimism over pessimism is that optimism enables a person to maintain a healthy mindset during hardships.

We can immediately attain an optimistic mindset when we decide to do so

Most of us believe that we can immediately attain an optimistic mindset when we decide to be optimistic. We, therefore, give up on optimism when we fail to maintain a constant state of optimism after a few hours/days of trying to be optimistic.

We fail to realize that we must practice positivity for a long time before we attain an optimistic mindset

If you just try to attain an optimistic mindset without practice, you will fall back to pessimism every now and then. Therefore, the only way you can become constantly optimistic is by working on achieving this mindset every day.

Last year, I gave up on optimism because I always succumbed to pessimism after a few minutes of trying to be optimistic. I concluded that optimism is an unreachable state of mind just because I couldn’t maintain it for an hour. I never knew that I must constantly practice optimism for me to attain an optimistic mindset.

This year, I’m trying to be optimistic by trying the ‘optimism challenge.’ In this challenge, you are supposed to avoid worry, complain, or any negative emotion for three weeks. And if you complain or entertain any negative emotions within the three weeks, you will have to start again until you complete three weeks without allowing any negative emotion in your mind.

According to Brian Tracy, the founder of this challenge, something good will happen if you successfully complete the challenge. I welcome you to this challenge, and please let me know if anything good happens to you after continuously staying optimistic for three weeks.

Concluding Remarks

I believe optimism is responsible for making many individuals persevere on the journey to success because it’s easier to keep working if you believe that your hard work will eventually pay. For this reason, we must practice optimism if we want to successfully complete our journey.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence – Helen Keller, American Author

It’s hard to work towards your goals with a pessimistic mindset because you will have to force yourself to work every day. Besides this, a pessimistic mindset will increase your chances of giving up because you’ll believe that your efforts won’t pay off. That being said, embrace optimism, and believe that everything will work out for the best.

You are free to add more ideas about the misconceptions about optimism in the comment box below.